Monitoring popular trends in your industry is a great way to improve your marketing efforts. By employing the use of trend tracking, you can grow your audience with simple, straightforward tactics. For example, leveraging a trends tracker to produce a content-rich blog post focusing on trending SEO keywords and search terms, can boost your website traffic and bring in new customers. A trending hashtag can increase your engagement on social media platforms and grow your followers.
With so many trend tracking tools available online, it can be overwhelming knowing where to start. We’ve done the research for you and explored the tools that produce the most consistent trend analysis results. Read on to learn more about 7 trend tracking tools that can help you improve your market research and marketing strategy.
Google Trends
When it comes to free trend analysis tools, Google Trends is a popular option. Google Trends is a free tool that allows you to ‘explore what the world is searching’ through keyword research, by entering a keyword or topic into their search engine. You can refine the data by filtering the results by country, category, and web search. For example, let’s say you are doing research on ‘cloud services’, and you enter that term into Google Trends. The category might be ‘Internet & Telecom’ and you have the option to select a time period and the type of web search. This could be a Google search, image search, news search, YouTube search, or Google shopping.
In addition to showing subregions and interest over time, you can also see related topics and queries. For ‘cloud services’, a related topic could be ‘information technology’ and a related query might be ‘cloud computing consulting services’. With all of this Google trends data, you are able to use the compare feature to search similar topics and data and view trends side by side. Marketers use this powerful search interest data to ensure that they’re content is relevant to the industry, region, and target audience. Google’s trend tracking data is gathered directly from searches, which helps you decide how to strategize your content to drive organic traffic to your website.
BuzzFeed
Another popular technology trend analysis tool is BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed is a gigantic database of what’s happening in social news and entertainment. Here you can find information on just about everything from politics to celebrity happenings to social conditions across the globe. While the content is not always highbrow and sophisticated, it does provide trend tracking insights on what the world is viewing online. Their unique page views are growing an average of 41% year over year, with a combined total of 139.4M page visits in Q3 and Q4 of 2020. Their content ranges from book recommendations and shopping guides to quizzes and the latest viral videos. But perhaps more interesting, is how BuzzFeed obtains this information about what is popular and trending. Cue our next trend tracking tool - BuzzSumo.
BuzzSumo
While the two companies are completely unrelated, BuzzSumo allows BuzzFeed to track virality of their trending posts. HubSpot, Expedia, Rolling Stone, and Ogilvy are also clients of BuzzSumo and utilize their data to help develop more effective content and improve their SEO rankings. Their website encourages clients to “Use our content insights to generate ideas, create high-performing content, monitor your performance and identify influencers.”
The BuzzSumo platform has four components: Discovery, Research, Influencers, and Monitoring. The discovery phase allows you infinite options for trend tracking. Not only can you see search volume for any time period, but you can also access cost-based data to inform your next PPC campaign. As trend analysis tools go, it's safe to say BuzzSumo is serious about their research. With over 5 billion articles, they hold the world’s largest index of social engagement data. Search through five years worth of historical data to monitor content performance amongst your competitors, and analyze meaningful insights.
Social media influencers can make a huge impact on your success and brand awareness. BuzzSumo makes the selection process a breeze by looking deeper than number of followers, and exploring engagement metrics that reveal the top influencers in your field. See what your competitors are sharing through their network of influencers and better understand what the market responds to. The monitoring feature allows you to set up alerts for mentions of your brand, or any other products and services you are interested in tracking.
Talkwalker
Talkwalker is another platform for identifying market trends. When users enter a keyword in Talkwalker Free Social Search they are given a snapshot of a variety of social KPIs such as reach, engagement, total mentions, intent, related hashtags, demographics, and top performing posts. Talkwalker offers the most comprehensive free coverage across social media channels. They focus on hashtag tracking, campaign tracking, event performance, and brand reputation. Their streamlined data presentation gives marketers easy-to-use and powerful insights.
While they are well-known for the free social search options, Talkwalker offers comprehensive consumer, marketing, and communications intelligence at an enterprise level. They believe data should be accessible to every team in every department, all the way to the C-suite. Their software analyzes online, social, print, and TV/radio content in one service. Talkwalker uses advanced AI to find the most relevant information, monitoring results in real-time with access to two years of historical data. Unlike their free market trend analysis tools, the enterprise options can be expensive, but with such powerful data, it’s no wonder their clients include companies like Adidas, Spotify, and US Bank.
YouTube
YouTube is the second most popular search engine next to Google, making it an excellent tool for trend tracking. Over two billion users log in to YouTube every month. One billion videos are watched every day, and 500 hours of video are uploaded every minute. Their main navigation menu features a Trending section, with five categories - music, gaming, news, movies, and fashion & beauty.
YouTube Studio dashboard allows marketers to track just about anything pertaining to your YouTube channel, all the way down to real-time video metrics. Spot new opportunities to engage your audience and turn viewers into subscribers. The YouTube Studio compare feature allows you to look at year-over-year video metrics and varying degrees of channel growth. Explore audience demographics and discover how they are finding your videos. Knowing where the traffic comes from will help you work with the YouTube algorithm to increase your views.
SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb provides informational website and app tracking intelligence. When you enter a URL into their search engine, you get a downloadable company overview with metrics pertaining to website rankings and traffic overview. For example, view the country rankings and percentage of users by country. Traffic Overview details the number of total visits, average visit duration, pages per visit, and bounce rate over a six month period.
Perhaps even more interesting is the referral and search data. Explore the breakdown of referral sites and destination sites, as well as percentage of organic versus paid traffic. Additional metrics include traffic data broken down by social media channels, display advertising, and information about your audience's interests. There is also a feature that reveals similar sites and ranks them according to their traffic metrics.
Hashtagify
While many trend tracking tools offer metrics on hashtags, Hashtagify focuses their efforts solely on this area of interest. Social media plays a big role in helping many companies get their messages to their audiences effectively. Hashtags are a valuable part of the social media experience when it comes to Instagram and Twitter. Hashtagify helps you identify the right hashtags for your industry based on popularity, correlations, influencers, and market trends. This information helps you plan ahead with your content calendar and analyze the performance of each hashtag. Their data also shows interesting variables such as languages used and spelling variations so you can make the most of your usage. Hashtagify also allows you to monitor your competitors, compare similar hashtags, and create customized reports for all of your desired analytics.
Conclusion
When considering how to follow business trends, it can be hard to know where to start. But, with so many free trend tracking tools available, you can immediately start compiling data for your marketing strategies. Remember that not all trend tracking information is relevant or beneficial for your organization so it's important to know what you need to isolate. So, now we've shared our top tracking tools examples, what are you waiting for? If you are looking for the most condensed and potent information for your business, reach out and discover how InfoDesk can help you gain the competitive advantage in your industry with customized intelligence.
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